Rockford Montessori students learning through doing — here and abroad

ROCKFORD — Students at Maria Montessori School are changing the world and saving lives one can of food, one brick, one game of Lin Po Po at a time.

Lin Po Po is a game the seventh- and eighth-graders have been playing for years, and Saturday night they shared the game with teens at GiGi’s Playhouse, a center for individuals with Down syndrome in Machesney Park. Hilarity ensued.

“It’s like follow-the-leader, but you don’t want the person in the middle to figure out you’re the leader so you have to be tricky,” said Ashlyn Horton, 13. “It’s really fun.”

Sharing their classroom game was just one of many simple gestures Horton and her classmates made during the luau-themed party they threw for their new friends at Gigi’s. They kicked off their shoes and danced. They played the limbo. They played catch with a “get-to-know-you” ball — a ball that has questions written on it that players answer depending on where they catch it.

The party at Gigi’s was just one of about a dozen community service projects the students have done this year. They collected coats for the homeless, organized food drives, volunteered at soup kitchens and visited elderly residents at nursing homes.

All the while, they made plans for their next big international project — a school for girls in Kenya — and their next trip to We Day.

We Day is series of a rock-star-packed stadium events where members of the international organization Free the Children gather for a day of inspiration and celebration. Thirteen Montessori students attended We Day in Minneapolis last fall. They saw the Jonas Brothers, Carly Rae Jepsen, Fifth Harmony, a handful of Disney stars and Martin Luther King III.

“It was fun doing the projects,” said eighth-grader Ave Johnson. “But then you walk into the stadium and see all of your peers and so many kids who are doing the same as you. ... It was amazing.”

Learning from life

Community service and social awareness is so interwoven into the studies at Rockford’s public Montessori school that students often have a hard time figuring out when they’re learning lessons in humanities and social studies and when they’re changing the world.

With the guidance of their teacher, Amy Orvis, they are learning that their actions matter, locally and globally.

The students didn’t just throw a party at GiGi’s Playhouse to fulfill the school’s community service requirement, Orvis said. Many of them met the 36-hour annual requirement months ago. They did it because doing nice things for others has become instilled in them.

“So many of my students just do things from the goodness of their hearts,” Orvis said.

Mykal Brown, 12, and Jaedon Sockwell, 13, are just two of those students.

“I like the feeling of helping people out,” Brown said.

“They were bundles of joy,” Sockwell said of the girls he danced with at the party.

The students raised $10,000 in 2010 to build a water well for a community in South Sudan. It was their first Free the Children project.

They launched their second campaign — construction of a girls’ school in Kenya — last month.

The projects come with a healthy dose of education, too, Orvis said. Before her students embark on a new project — local or international — they spend class time learning the history and social context of the problem they’re trying to help address.

They’ll study the government, business and culture of Kenya and why girls there need a school for the remainder of the year and into next year.

“Sometimes it’s hard to believe we’re doing something like that for people in another country so far away,” said 13-year-old Kiara Prymer. “But we’re doing it.”